Anne Marie Treisman (née Taylor; 27 February 1935 – 9 February 2018) was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology.

Treisman researched visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with Garry Gelade in 1980. Treisman taught at the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Notable postdoctoral fellows she supervised included Nancy Kanwisher and Nilli Lavie.

In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the study of attention. During her long career, Treisman experimentally and theoretically defined the issue of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects that guide human thought and action.

Early life and education

Anne Treisman was born in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England on 27 February 1935. Two years later, her family moved to a village near Rochester, Kent where her father, Percy Taylor, worked as chief education officer during World War II. Her mother, Suzanne Touren, was French. The English educational system at the time required Treisman to choose only three subjects in her last two years at secondary school, and Treisman focused on the language arts (French, Latin and History).

Treisman received her BA in French Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1954. She received a first class BA with distinction, which earned her a scholarship that she used to obtain a second BA in psychology. During this extra year, Treisman studied under the supervision of Richard Gregory, who introduced her to various methods of exploring the mind through experiments in perception. While at Cambridge, she was active in the folk music scene.

In 1957, Treisman attended Somerville College, Oxford, to work toward her DPhil under her advisor, Carolus Oldfield.

Treisman completed her thesis, "Attention and speech", in 1961.

Career

thumb|Treisman discussing her life and career

Around the time Treisman was working toward her DPhil, psychology was shifting from a behaviorist point to view to the idea that behavior is the outcome of active information processing. Donald Broadbent and Colin Cherry had recently introduced the idea of selective listening (often exemplified by the so-called "cocktail party effect") Broadbent later proposed a Filter Model of selective attention which states that unattended auditory information is not analysed but rather it is filtered out early in the process of perception. It appeared that complete rejection of one language was almost impossible; with some degree of variability depending on physical characteristics and language of the message received. Treisman concluded that features of multiple incoming messages are successfully analysed, and that selection between messages in the same voice, intensity, and localisation takes place during, rather than before or after, this analysis, which results in the identification of their verbal content.

Treisman and Kahneman accepted positions at the University of British Columbia shortly after their marriage. In 1980, Treisman and Gelade published their seminal paper on Feature Integration Theory (FIT). One key element of FIT is that early stages of object perception encode features such as color, form, and orientation as separate entities; focused attention combines these distinct features into perceived objects.

Treisman moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986, where she and Kahneman ran a joint "Attention Lab" in the Psychology Department. From 1993 until her retirement, in 2010, Treisman was a member of the Psychology Department at Princeton University. She was named Princeton's James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology in 1995. Her work has appeared in 29 book chapters and more than 80 journal articles and is heavily cited in the psychological literature, as well as prominently included in both introductory and advanced textbooks. Established with an anonymous gift in 2015, the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, housed in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, honors the legacy of Daniel Kahneman and Anne Treisman.

Feature integration theory

Treisman's feature integration theory is a two-stage model of visual object perception:

;Pre-attentive stage

The first stage is called "pre-attentive" because it happens automatically, or without effort or attention by the perceiver. In this stage, an object is broken down into its elementary features for processing (i.e., color, texture, shape, etc.). Treisman posits we are unaware of this stage of attention because it occurs quickly and early in perceptual processes (before conscious awareness). Under these conditions, participants reported seeing illusory conjunctions in 18% of trials. That is, participants reported seeing objects that consisted of a combination of features from two different stimuli. For example, after seeing a big yellow circle, a big blue triangle, a small red triangle, and a small green circle, a person might report seeing a small red circle and a small green triangle. The reason illusory conjunctions occurred is that stimuli were presented rapidly and the observers' attention was distracted from the target object by having them focus on the black numbers; thus, elementary features had not yet been grouped or bound to an object. Having participants attend to the target objects eliminated the illusory conjunction.

;Focused attention stage

The second stage of processing depends on attention. In this stage, the features are combined, resulting in the perception of a whole object rather than individual features.

The binding problem

William James discussed the connection between attention and mental processes, "Millions of items…are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to…Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others." local cell assemblies onto which the pathways from different feature maps converge, perhaps with adjustable connections allowing flexible routing of signals; a serial scan of different spatial areas selected by an adjustable attention window, conjoining the features that each contains and excluding features from adjacent areas; Treisman used failures of binding to shed light on its underlying mechanisms. Specifically, she found that left-brain-damaged patients have increasing illusory conjunctions and decreased performance in a spatially cued attention task, which suggests a link between attentional binding and the parietal lobes. the US National Academy of Sciences in 1994, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995, and the American Philosophical Society in 2005, as well as a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 2002. Treisman was the recipient of the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for her explanation of how our brains build meaningful images from what we see. In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the study of attention.

Selected publications

Key works include:

Personal life

Treisman married Michel Treisman in 1960, another Oxford graduate student.

She had four children: Jessica Treisman (b. 1963), a professor of cell biology at NYU School of Medicine; Daniel Treisman (b. 1964), a professor of political science at UCLA; Stephen Treisman (b. 1968), who lives in Berkshire; and Deborah Treisman (b. 1970), a fiction editor at The New Yorker.

She died on 9 February 2018, from a stroke, at her home in Manhattan.

See also

  • Subitizing

References

Further reading

  • Treisman's homepage at Princeton
  • Treisman's Academic CV
  • Video of Treisman talking about her work, from the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation
  • "One on one... with Anne Treisman" at The Psychologist, published November 2010